Learning Words Via Reading: Contextual Diversity, Spacing, and Retrieval Effects in Adults

Pagán, Ascensión; Nation, Kate

doi:10.1111/cogs.12705

Cited by 40 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…This means that, in the full absence of comprehension problems, diversity only had a positive impact, making the pseudowords easier to recall, recognize, and match with their meaning. Our results are in line with prior studies that show effects of diversity above and beyond those of frequency 4,20,22 . This suggests that simply manipulating contextual diversity might be enough to improve performance without increasing frequency of exposure.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

The effects of contextual diversity on incidental vocabulary learning in the native and a foreign language

Frances

Martin

Duñabeitia

2020

Sci Rep

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Vocabulary learning occurs throughout the lifespan, often implicitly. For foreign language learners, this is particularly challenging as they must acquire a large number of new words with little exposure. In the present study, we explore the effects of contextual diversity-namely, the number of texts a word appears in-on native and foreign language word learning. Participants read several texts that had novel pseudowords replacing high-frequency words. The total number of encounters with the novel words was held constant, but they appeared in 1, 2, 4, or 8 texts. In addition, some participants read the texts in Spanish (their native language) and others in English (their foreign language). We found that increasing contextual diversity improved recall and recognition of the word, as well as the ability to match the word with its meaning while keeping comprehension unimpaired. Using a foreign language only affected performance in the matching task, where participants had to quickly identify the meaning of the word. Results are discussed in the greater context of the word learning and foreign language literature as well as their importance as a teaching tool. Vocabulary learning is an essential aspect of language that continues throughout the lifespan. To a large extent, the vocabulary we incorporate comes from incidental learning during reading 1,2 rather than explicit effort. This becomes particularly relevant when learning a new language, where a large amount of vocabulary must be acquired very quickly and partially without supervision. Following this reasoning, several studies have shown that it is possible to learn vocabulary implicitly through reading in our foreign language 3-7. In addition, we know that people incorporate new lexical forms with as little as one exposure in their native language and as little as two exposures in their foreign language 4 , but that learning improves with exposure to multiple instances of the word 8. Implicit word learning in context differs somewhat between one's native and foreign languages. In particular, reading times for new words in our native language decrease significantly after the first exposure-suggesting some level of incorporation of the lexical item-whereas for the foreign language this happens only after two to four exposures 4. This might relate to the fact that it is more difficult to extract the meaning of words from context in a foreign language. This is in part because these skills seem to be affected by knowledge of the language and experience in that particular task 9,10. Although the number of times people encounter a word affects how well they learn and remember it 5,8 , there is not much literature on how spreading these encounters across passages affects learning. One of the ways in which this spread is quantified is through contextual diversity-namely, the number of texts in which a word appears in a database 11,12. This variable can be used to describe the influence of context beyond the mere number of occurrences or the frequency with which we encou...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

The effects of contextual diversity on incidental vocabulary learning in the native and a foreign language

Frances

Martin

Duñabeitia

2020

Sci Rep

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“…The findings reported by Bolger and colleagues (2008) are consistent with this, in that their varied contexts yielded better acquisition than presenting participants with an identical context repeatedly. These findings are also consistent with other studies that have shown that repeated exposures to novel or less familiar words helps with learning the words (Eskenazi et al, 2018;Jenkins et al, 1984;Pagán & Nation, 2019). However, when the context was inconsistent across encounters, memory performance was not nearly as strong in the present study.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

“…In addition, Bolger and colleagues (2008) argued that it is particularly beneficial to learn new words within a range of varied contexts, resulting in a more abstract understanding of their meanings, when compared with a single repeated context or a single definition that does not provide any of the words' nuances. Pagán and Nation (2019) provided evidence of the benefit of exposures to unfamiliar words in varied context but within an incidental acquisition paradigm, instead of explicit instruction. Eskenazi and colleagues (2018) also found that multiple exposures to novel words increased word learning, even when the words were in uninformative contexts.…”

Section: Contextual Use In Incidental Vocabulary Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Informative Context’s Meaning Consistency During Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Lowell

Pender

Binder

2020

Reading Research Quarterly

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The authors examined the influence of context meaning consistency on incidental vocabulary acquisition during reading. Context meaning consistency refers to informational context that reflected the same meaning (i.e., consistent) or different meanings (i.e., inconsistent) across two self‐paced reading sessions for a given item (both sessions on the same day). The first sentence of each sentence‐pair item contained informational context, and the second sentence contained a target word (novel target or known control). Acquisition was assessed via surprise memory tests given right after the reading sessions (immediate) and again approximately a week later (delayed). Inconsistent context was generally associated with inflated reading times and less recall than consistent context, and retention was particularly low when the first encounter with the novel target was during the second reading session. Self‐paced reading times were also particularly inflated in the second reading session for items in which readers encountered the novel word version of the target for the first time (i.e., known control encountered during the first reading session instead). Acquisition was facilitated most for novel targets that were presented during both reading sessions in consistent meaning context, but suffered the most in the case of consistent context and the novel target initially encountered in the second session. When presented with different meanings for the same novel target across self‐paced reading sessions (inconsistent context condition), the intended meaning for the initial presentation was more likely to remain in memory.

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“…Overall, eye movement monitoring while reading novel words appears as particularly useful for the real-time study of orthographic learning . Most previous studies focused on the effect of the learning context on eye movements, focusing on the order-of-acquisition (Joseph et al, 2014), contextual diversity, spacing and retrieval practice (Pagan & Nation, 2019) or the diversity of semantic contexts (Joseph & Nation, 2018). Only a few studies manipulated the number of exposures and studied eye movement changes throughout exposures (Gerbier et al, 2015(Gerbier et al, , 2018Joseph & Nation, 2018;Joseph et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic learning of novel words in adults: effects of exposure and visual attention on eye movements

Ginestet

Valdois

Diard

et al. 2020

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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Eye movement monitoring was used to explore the time course of orthographic learning in adult skilled readers while they read novel words presented in isolation one, three or five times. Offline measures of spelling-to-dictation and orthographic decision were used to measure orthographic memorisation. Further, the participants' visual attention span was estimated. Results showed better memorisation of new words' orthography with additional exposures. An exposure-by-exposure in-depth analysis of eye movements revealed an early sharper decrease for the number of fixations and most measures of processing time. Participants with a higher visual attention span showed better performance in orthographic decision and processing times. The overall findings suggest that orthographic learning occurs from the first exposure and that top-down effects from the newly acquired orthographic knowledge would facilitate processing from the second exposure. Further, time needed for bottom-up information extraction appears to be modulated by visual attention span.

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Learning Words Via Reading: Contextual Diversity, Spacing, and Retrieval Effects in Adults

Cited by 40 publications

References 65 publications

The effects of contextual diversity on incidental vocabulary learning in the native and a foreign language

The effects of contextual diversity on incidental vocabulary learning in the native and a foreign language

Impact of Informative Context’s Meaning Consistency During Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Orthographic learning of novel words in adults: effects of exposure and visual attention on eye movements

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